Posts tagged as 'tower'

Fri 24.7.

Developed by Alf Naman and currently in construction, HL23 is a 14 floor condominium tower that responds to a unique and challenging site directly adjacent to the High Line at 23rd street in New York’s West Chelsea Arts district. Partially impacted by a spur from the elevated tracks that make up the High Line superstructure, the site is 40′ x 99′ at the ground floor.

NMDA's work with clients is based on a mutual need to make design a key element in solving problems and in projecting an image.

The site and the developer demanded a specific response, yielding a project that is a natural merger between found and given parameters and architectural ambition. For the client, the question was how to expand the possible built floor area of a restricted zoning envelope. For the site, a supple geometry must be found to allow a larger building to stand in very close proximity to the elevated park of the High Line. Together, the demands produced a building with one unit per floor and three distinct yet coherent facades, a rarity in Manhattan’s block structure.

Renderings by Hayes Davidson, London / copyright 2008

With a custom non-spandrel curtainwall on the south and north facades, and a 3D stainless steel panel facade on the east facing the High Line, the project’s geometry is driven by challenges to the zoning envelope on the site and by NMDA’s interest in achieving complexity through simple tectonic operations.

Mon 15.6.

When Gustave Eiffel buit his iron tower in 1889 he caused a sensation because of the industrial look and the bare construction of the town´s landmark to be.

This year at the end of March the young designer Nicolas Mouret unveiled his proposal for the Eiffel competition, a flexible and light tower, which caused a furore, partly because of its beautiful appearance but also for another less pleasant reason.

The flexible construction

The construction consists of eight mono-bloc structural members which are articulated by gimbals and guys that ensure stability while allowing rotating movement. They are fibre concrete tubes filled by ultra strong fibrecrete and carry spoke- beams with triangulated extremities, stiffened and tied by cables.

'Phyte' by Nicolas Mouret

“This project is a part of a reflection concerning the lack of naturalness in a city and the way to balance it without the use of organic matter, living vegetable matter.

My conclusion was that the city would be a vast expanse of static buildings buildings in which the only movements would be the streams of traffic. On the contrary, nature would be a synonym for perpetual motion. Therefore this tower (ultra strong fibrecrete) would be moving in a frozen city.

The other constraint was to take a stand in the tradition of Gustave Eiffel’s works, and to build with resources that he wouldn´t have been able to use in his time.

Also in my opinion it wasn’t possible for me to think of a building of 380 meters in height that would be functional only at its single root, that’s why the stance of this moving tower that would give life to Paris, reminding us of natural movements like the dance of the grass, the flow of the waves, clouds of sand in the desert…” Nicolas explains.

Detail

The 24-year old Nicolas actually won the Eiffel competition, but was disqualified immediately after the jury found out that he wasn´t an architecture student but a design student, which is against the rules of the competition. By the way, Gustave Eiffel wasn´t an architect but an engineer.